Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry. By Hugh S. Gorman. Series on Technology and the Environment. Series Editors, Jeffrey Stine, and Joel Tarr. Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001. Pp. xv, 451. $49.95, cloth; $39.95, paper.

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In this well-written, documented, and technically complete book, Hugh Gorman describes the response of the American petroleum industry to pollution over the course of the twentieth century. The industry, which grew and matured during this period as an integral part of modern industrialization, faced serious, and often dramatic pollution problems. They were inherent in production from common oil pools that encouraged haste, waste, and excessive surface storage; in transportation through pipelines and tanker trucks and ships; and in refining and storing complex hydrocarbons that easily escaped into the air, soil, or aquifers. Reaction to pollution brought new technologies, organizational forms, firm collaboration, and regulation—all of which are described and documented from primary and secondary sources throughout this volume. Gorman partitions efforts to address pollution into two “ethics”—an efficiency ethic that characterized industry action through the 1960s and an environmental ethic that came into being in the 1970s. The efficiency ethic describes antipollution efforts to reduce the costly wastes associated with extraction and shipment, including saving lost oil from “gusher” wells and leaky tanks and pipelines, as well as capturing natural gas and water voided in production that could be re-injected and used to propel oil to the surface. Efficiency also required greater productivity and less waste in refining through reducing vapor and hydrocarbon discharges and recycling acids and other chemicals. The firms could capture the benefits of internalizing the externalities associated with these pollutants. In tables 2.1 and 4.3 Gorman lists some of the pollution and waste-related problems encountered in oil production, shipment, and refining that were addressed effectively by firms without much government intervention. He describes the role of the major trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, in generating information for oil firms to reduce externalities.